At the start of the millennium, Korean cinema made a huge global impact, in part thanks to gruesome revenge tales like Oldboy (2003) and I Saw the Devil (2010). While revenge never goes out of style, recent big global hits to come out of Korea have focused more on capitalistic critique, such as Squid Game (2021-2025), Parasite (2019), and the 2026 film No Other Choice from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook. Teddy Bears Never Die by Cho Yeeun is a novel which manages to follow in both traditions, delivering a spooky supernatural revenge tale about how capitalism exploits people.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Author Cho says as much in the content warning at the start of the novel: “This is a work of fiction depicting the harsh reality of the society we unfortunately live in, and the consequences of greed and chasing wealth.” I have mixed feelings on content warnings in novels, but what I find particularly discouraging is to see authors state plainly at the start of a book the intended themes of their work. Isn’t that something a reader should figure out on their own, or barring that, from their friendly neighbourhood Strange Horizons reviewer?

But the book is not just a screed against greed and capitalism. Its story is anchored by strong characters. Teddy Bears Never Die features two protagonists out for revenge. One of them is Hwayoung, a seventeen-year-old girl whose mother died two years ago in a mass poisoning incident. But Hwayoung doesn’t believe that her mother was just one of the random victims: Her mom hated sticky sweets after all, and never would have willingly eaten the ggultteok left on people’s doorsteps. Hwayoung is certain her mother was targeted for death, and she is even pretty certain of who did it. Now she is just striving to save up enough money to hire an assassin and get her revenge.

That’s not easy to do when you’re a teenager living on the fringes of society. As the story starts, Hwayoung quickly loses both her sources of income: Her fake charity scam gets uncovered and her manager at McDonald’s discovers that she lied about her age, resulting in her getting fired. On top of that, Hwayoung’s landlord, Youngjin, is squeezing her for more rent. Youngjin is a young man with many criminal enterprises, one of them being that he rents out a slum apartment to several children who have no other place to go. Youngjin makes an offer to Hwayoung: If she’ll take part in a scam he runs, he’ll let her have a cut of the money.

Youngjin’s scam involves posting a for-sale ad online and then jumping the buyer when he arrives to make the sale (having a young woman as “the seller” helps lure in men and get their guard down). Hwayoung has up until now resisted being the bait in these “fishing trips,” but with no other way to get money, she agrees.

It’s not a big surprise when the fishing trip goes south and Hwayoung’s life is in danger. What is a surprise is when she’s rescued by an axe-wielding teddy bear.

Which brings us to the other protagonist. Doha is a seventeen-year-old boy who also lost his family in the poisoning incident from two years ago. He differs from Hwayoung in that he doesn’t mourn the loss. His mother was negligent and his father abusive, forever comparing Doha to his high-achieving cousin Dohyun—and beating Doha when he came up short. After his parents’ deaths, Doha goes to live with his uncle, Han Junghyuk. Junghyuk also lost someone to the poisoned ggultteok: his handsome, brilliant, popular, beloved son Dohyun. Even with Dohyun dead, Doha still feels in his shadow—perhaps even more so than when Dohyun was alive.

Then Doha wakes up in the body of a teddy bear, totally at a loss as to what happened to his human body and how he ended up in a pile of garbage.

Doha’s and Hwayoung’s paths converge when she rescues the bear from a stray cat and stitches him up, even washing the trash stink off of him. After Doha saves Hwayoung from being murdered, they strike a deal: Doha will help Hwayoung get revenge for her mom if she will help Doha get back to his human body.

An intriguing element of the book is how relatively grounded it is at the start. Hwayoung’s POV is gritty and her concerns tied to very tangible, earthly things. When a supernatural component is introduced in the form of a possessed teddy bear, she is so laser-focused on revenge that she is able to quickly absorb it into her worldview in an almost apathetic way—her main concern is if it can help her solve the mystery behind her mom’s death. The first few chapters of the book veer more crime than horror, more Stieg Larsson than Stephen King.

But then we get Doha’s POV. Even before he woke up in the body of a teddy bear, Doha was aware of the supernatural. He could see ghosts and had learned the best thing to do was to just pretend you didn’t. Now, in teddy bear form, he’s still able to see spirits, giving his POV a very different feel to Hwayoung’s.

Hwayoung and Doha are great, believable teenage characters. Though Hwayoung has to scam people to survive, that doesn’t make her any less sympathetic as a child who’s been left behind by society. And, even after everything she’s been through, she is still naïve, trusting the wrong people and getting in over her head. Doha, meanwhile, seems like a cypher at first: All his life he’s been berated for not being more like his cousin, and even in the narrative he is introduced as being defined more by what he isn’t than by what he is. But as the novel goes on it becomes clear that Doha has his own identity apart from just being in his cousin’s shadow. He loves stuffed animals, is sensitive and shy but also loyal and brave.

Even though the book has a possessed teddy bear as a main character, for the first half of the book it feels very much like a crime novel that has a light supernatural element. The focus is on the evil of which humans are capable, and this is broadly applied: slumlord Youngjin and corrupt politician/land developer Junghyuk may be on different social strata but, as far as the book is concerned, they are the same, both of them using their power and wealth to squeeze money and blood out of the people below them. Though Cho’s critique of capitalism is on point, it feels like she doesn’t say much new here: When the cost of living becomes too expensive to live with, human life becomes cheap.

After the halfway point an interesting shift starts to occur. The horror elements which have to that point been merely background noise come to the forefront, slowly opening like a widening maw under the reader’s feet. The human antagonists who once seemed so powerful are nothing in the face of the supernatural. Angry ghosts don’t care about profit or money. Like Hwayoung, they are driven purely by revenge.

Teddy Bears Never Die is such a well-done horror-crime novel, drawing from both genres to create something bleak and scary but also ultimately hopeful. Because it’s such a mix of things, I worry about it finding its readership. Can horror fans get on board with the tense slow-burn noirish first half? Can crime readers get on board with a novel that has a talking teddy bear as a protagonist? I hope so, as I think both camps would find a lot to love here.